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| Photo by Lisa Noble |
Itwas pure coincidence that I read Ann Packer’s
The Children’s Crusade in the same week that I read
A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler (
reviewed in this blog on 6/22). The similarities are striking although, in my view, Tyler’s is the better book.
In each novel, a man falls in love with a piece of property and lives on it the rest of his life. In
Blue Thread, Junior, a contractor, builds his dream house for clients and then engineers their moving out and selling it to him. In
The Children’s Crusade, Bill Blair, a Navy physician, manages to get a weekend pass and, north of San Francisco, finds a beautiful piece of land which he buys “on a whim,” and on which he later builds a house. In both novels, the house looms large in the family’s history and in the memories of the children raised in it.
There’s more. In both novels, there is the irresponsible, difficult child who, as an adult, returns home to wreak more havoc. In
Blue Thread, it
